1992 FLHS
I was thinking my primary cover was polished aluminum so I attacked the 'pitting' with aluminum polish. Same stuff that gave me a very good shine on my shovel. Made no difference. Then I thought maybe it is a poor chrome job so I grabbed the fine steel wool that did an awesome job on the rest of the chrome. Again, made almost no difference. I've concluded that the 'shine' on my primary cover must be some sort of alien technology that I'm not familiar with.

Has anyone else had this issue? What have you used to clean up this kind of pitting?

 

Clearcoat is your problem ... Remove the clearcoat ( stripper or sanding 320, 600, 1000 ) and then polish ... It will look better than new

 

Dam! Clearcoat didn't even enter my mind

 

Get some Polishing Rouge and a polishing pad after sanding its a dirty job once you get that level its not bad to maintain by hand

 

Aircraft stripper is what you want to use. The other stuff will leave you disappointed. HDF search could not find this thread but google found it immediately.

https://www.hdforums.com/forum/gener...with-pics.html

You always, always want to be done sanding, filing, scraping, etc before you try to polish the surface. Use a soft material to scrape and remove the coating. Clean the surface several times with a good degreaser that will lift oils and grease off the surface. I use Dawn dish washing soap and Goop hand cleaner, very safe and very effective. After it's all l clean and dried I start to polish with the final compounds.

 

Aircraft stripper ... Yep ... My bad I should have mentioned that in my posting ... That works great

 

If the clear coat is the same as used on fork sliders this does a very good job in removing it -
If the casing is already smooth then you can probably skip quite a few grades of paper and go quite fine to remove the white oxidation if it doesn't come off with the clear coat.